5 Strategy & Execution

Evolving views of sales

• Levitt: Selling concerns itself with the tricks and techniques of getting people to exchange their cash for your product. It does not, as marketing invariably does, view the entire business process as consisting of a tightly integrated effort to discover, create, arouse, and satisfy customer needs

• Follett Carter: As customer loyalties diminish and marketing channels proliferate, sales – once seen as a tactical adjunct to marketing – has increased its role to become the key interaction between company and customer

Communicating value 

• there’s value in the whole exchange relationship of buyer and seller

• marketing encompasses diff ways to communicate value to customers

  • Ads and promotions

  • Public relations

  • Direct and interactive marketing 

  • Personal selling

Personal selling 

• Face to face communication meant to increase probability of purchase

  • EX: car salesmen, walmart conference rooms

Interactions between marketing and sales 

• conceptualized as a purchase funnel

  • Creating demand (marketing) and fulfilling demand (sales)

• As you go down levels, you lose some customers because of different influences 

How is brand equity measured?

It is about our perception of the value of the brand 

1. How familiar is the brand?

2. How much regard do people have for the brand?

3. How much meaning does the brand have to consume?

4. How unique is the brand?

Brand identity: what Apple thinks of their brand

Brand image: what we think of Apple as a brand

Critical measurability differences 

• Sales

  • Easier to measure because sales are tangible or quantifiable 

• Marketing

  • Understanding marketing is a long term investment

  • Marketers’ ambiguous contributions make them more vulnerable when money is tight

Options for better sales and marketing integration 

• Disciplined communication 

• Joint assignments: rotating jobs 

• Popups offer nice blend of marketing and sales

• Appoint a CRO/CCO

Not realistic

• Provide incentives for sales force feedback

Role of internal negotiation 

• Salespeople and marketers may disagree about whether a customer deserves a lower price, so they negotiate internally to decide when discounts are justified

• Constant price negotiations waste time 

  • Salespeople want lower prices to hit quotas

  • Marketers want to protect prices to keep profit

• They require lobbying 

  • If demand is high, no incentive for salespeople to lobby

  • If demand is low, incentive for salespeople to lobby (marketers happy with this)

Pull marketing

• When is this used?

  • To motivate consumers to seek out the product 

• When is it appropriate?

  • When there is high brand loyalty and high involvement in the particular category

  • When consumers choose the brand before going to the store

• Stimulating needs

  • convincing customers they need your product (going noseblind from febreeze)

Push marketing

• When is this used?

  • Use sales and promotion money to induce intermediaries to carry, promote, and sell the product to end users 

• When is it appropriate?

  • Low brand loyalty

  • When consumers choose the brand inside in the store 

  • We don’t see the initial part which happens when manufacturer’s sales force negotiates with retailers

Best marketers use push and pull 

• Use a combination of all 3 of these:

  • Owned media: website, merch

  • Earned media: free reviews, testimonies

  • Paid media: boosted ads, google ads